Chosen By Taos Magical, Mystical Southwestern Town Invades Hearts Of Visitors And Artists So That Many Feel Called To Stay

So many stories surround Taos, I felt apprehensive when Highway 518 emerged from the evergreen Carson National Forest and looped down into the remote northern New Mexico valley.

It was night - too dark to see the San Francisco De Asis Church Georgia O’Keefe painted or the snow-capped mountain said to haunt artists. Yet as the wide Paseo del Pueblo Sur carried me into the village, I was nervously aware that - according to legend - people who enter Taos are destined to remain there forever … or else become so restless that they can never live contentedly anywhere else.

In the daylight, when vacationers crowded the narrow walkways around the Plaza and lined up to buy capuccino from a pushcart in the courtyard outside the Governor Bent Museum, I could laugh off my jitters. This was (I reassured myself) just another tourist town - an upscale version of the old Southwest with an arty, New Age flavor.

I bought terra cotta earrings at an adobe souvenir shop, ate nouveau cuisine enchiladas at a restaurant called Jacquelina’s, drove out across the meadows to gape at the 600-foot plunge of the Rio Grande Gorge. Then, gazing across the vast, iridescent field of blue-green sagebrush, I told myself I could leave anytime I wanted.

I simply didn’t want to yet.

“When the mountain wants you, you will stay,” warned a gray-haired woman, her smile placid, knowing. She was from Texas, but the mountain had wanted her, and suddenly here she was at a Taos Art Festival show where her husband - whom the mountain also wanted - had won a prize for his birch panel designs. When good fortune such as this happen, “you know.” She tapped her heart. “You know in here.”

Only 4,500 people live in Taos, but some 1,336 of them are artists. Everywhere I went, there they were: Painting murals on garbage dumpsters, teaching creativity workshops at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, pouring cranberry punch at gallery openings, holding up the checkout lines at Walmart’s as they chatted about “the quality of the light.”

There is, indeed, a strange intensity to the light in the mountains surrounding Taos, and a magical, magnetic quality to the vast red landscapes, the alien rock formations, the ageless pueblo dwellings. Yet this mystical aura permeates much of the American Southwest, from the celebrated energy vortexes of Sedona to the profoundly serene Navajo and Hopi reservations. Taos is but one pocket of creativity in a region famous for painters, writers, psychic healers, UFO disciples and entrepreneurial hippies.

For the artists of Taos, however, the siren’s call echoes most loudly and most irresistibly in the peaks and valleys of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range. Many of these converts did not intend to settle here. They were just passing through, visiting a friend, heading for some other destination, when Taos Mountain reached out and seized their souls.

“It hit me like a brick wall,” says Bill Davis, a photographer who arrived in 1969. “I was captured.”

“Taos chose me,” says Susan Ammann, who left Wall Street to make pots in an adobe studio.

“I came to buy an RV park,” says Rhode Island native Phoebe M. Sullins. Surprisingly, mysteriously, she stayed to become a painter.

Kyle Morgan, also a painter, grew up in Taos, but left. “I had to come back,” she explains. “I kept having dreams about the mountain, the Pueblo.”

Again and again artists speak of this magic, telling stories so polished and practiced they take on the luster of a fairy tale. Sometimes voices are quiet, reverential, and sometimes a bit too earnest, as though the tellers are trying to convince themselves that the tales are true.

“Nothing special brought me to Taos,” one artist said in defiance. All those stories about the call of the mountain are, she said, “kitsch.” Another artist described the stories as “slick and sentimental” and compared them to an R.C. Gorman print.

She was referring to the popular painter and sculptor whose streamlined female forms are reproduced and mass-marketed in discount furniture stores. Until I came to Taos, I’d never heard of Gorman, but I was curious enough to drive up the steep hillside to his glass-walled home. It was surrounded by smooth white sculptures with the predictable round, blank faces my artist friend had criticized. There was, as she had said, a sameness to these works. But, like the stories of Taos Mountain, the sculptures were beautiful, seductive.

For anyone who has ever dreamed of running away and starting life anew, so much about Taos is seductive. There’s the startling beauty of the American Southwest - the visual shock of flame-colored hills and vivid blue skies. There’s the dizzying effect of the high-altitude atmosphere. There’s the exciting Southwestern mix of cowboys, Indians and descendants of Spanish colonialists.

And, as in every remote region of the high desert, there’s the profound sense of isolation. Most planes will go only as far as Albuquerque. After that, it’s a lonely three-hour drive across arid expanses, up circuitous mountain roads, past clusters of tin-roofed huts.

No gas stations, no rest stops, no shopping plazas until suddenly - ah! There in the foothills, the town appears, glittering like a chunk of rose quartz tucked in the palm of a giant’s gentle hand.

By my third day in Taos, I had already fallen under its spell. I was perusing real estate ads. I was loitering outside houses for sale. I was thinking that perhaps this was, after all, paradise.

Then, reality hit.

“The idea of Taos as a paradise is a myth,” says Anita Rodriguez, painter and activist in the Hispanic community. According to Rodriguez, the utopian promise comes true only for a select - mostly Anglo - minority.

“The culture that first drew artists to Taos were the Indian and Hispanic cultures,” says Rodriguez. “Yet, until five years ago, it was nearly impossible for a Hispanic artist to be represented by a Taos gallery.”

Native Americans have voiced similar complaints. “My grandfather gave his pieces away not knowing how much they are worth,” says Carlos Barela, a woodcarver. “That’s not going to happen again. I’m not going to sell my work cheap.”

Of course, the predominately Anglo galleries have recognized some Hispanic and Native American artists. John Suazo, who grew up in Taos Pueblo, is renowned for his simple, evocative sculptures inspired by pre-Columbian culture.

However, art forms most often practiced by native groups - pottery, jewelry, textiles and religious works - are frequently overlooked. Moreover, many Native American and Hispanic artists do not have the business training necessary to attract galleries or to aggressively market their work.

The result? Isolated groups of creative people who produce quantities of beautiful and meaningful work, yet know little about each other. “This community,” says Anita Rodriguez, “is ghettoized.”

Meanwhile, the longing for paradise continues to lure artists and free spirits from California, New York and other far-flung places. Rents have skyrocketed, and bulletin boards at book stores and coffee houses are papered with desperate messages: “Wanted - Studio apartment or room for quiet painter” (or “sculptor” or “composer” or “poet”).

At the adobe McDonald’s, locals grumble that Taos is getting too big, that tourists have taken over the Plaza. And, amid howls of protest, Eya Fechin, daughter of the famed painter Nicolai Fechin, has constructed an 85-room inn behind her father’s secluded Taos home.

Rebelling against these forces, a group of mostly young artists has formed a collaborative in Arroyo Seco, a tiny, mountainside village five miles uphill from Taos. The artists display avant garde works, perform improvisational theater, and stage ‘60s-style “happenings” in a tworoom house called the Art Lab.

Just up the road, Barbara Waters, widow of Taos writer Frank Waters, is resisting pressure to sell her acreage to real-estate developers. Instead, the land will be used as a haven for writers and artists.

So, it seems, paradise isn’t found, it’s created: It’s made by going out into the wilderness, turning away from all that is trendy and sure, listening for whatever messages might blow in from the hills, joining forces with fellow seekers and sinking down roots in uncharted territories.

Ironically, the most earnest efforts to create paradise often destroy it. But true believers persist, weaving wishes like a Navajo blanket, forming colorful and comforting myths of magic and healing.

Learning this made it possible for me to leave Taos. As my rental car climbed Route 68 toward Pilar, I felt a tug, as though I was pushing through the membrane of a dream. Then, my spirit soared and I drove - a bit too fast - past red cliffs and frosted mountains. If they called out, I did not listen. The spell was broken.

Or so I thought.

Upon my return home, I did something unexpected. I packed my belongings and moved out of my apartment. I did not go far - I simply moved to an upper floor in the same building. But, like Taos, the elevation is high and the light is brilliant. I’m hanging prints by Taos artists Carlos Hall, Tom Noble, and - yes - R.C. Gorman. I’m doing guided meditations. I’m pretending I never left.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TAOS ART SCENE Taos has more than 80 galleries, six museums, two art schools, three art associations, and at least five annual arts and crafts fairs. Here are some of the important art events for 1997. For more information, call 1-800-732-8267. April 10-13: Taos Talking Picture Festival. Over 100 feature-length films, plus documentaries, video presentations and a conference on cinema art. May 2-18: Taos Spring Arts Festival. A major art show, an artisan festival and gallery openings. Sept. 12-28: Taos Society of Artists Founders Show. At the Ernest L. Blumenschein Home and Museum. Sept. 19-Oct. 5: 23rd Annual Taos Fall Arts Festival. Special exhibitions, an arts and crafts fair, a wool festival and gallery openings. Sept. 27-28: Old Taos Trade Fair at Hacienda Martinez. Woodcarvers, weavers and other artisans demonstrate their craft. Taos is for writers, too… Calling the region “one of the most magnetic centres of the world,” D.H. Lawrence briefly made his home in Taos. Since then, writers as well as visual artists have felt the pull of the “magic mountain.” Here’s a sampling of the literary scene. Caffe Tazza - Located next to the Taos Book Shop, this funky little restaurant hosts open-mike readings every week. (122 Kit Carson Road, Taos, 87571) The Frank Waters Foundation - In memory of the celebrated Taos author, his mountainside acreage will become a retreat for selected writers who desire to “get in touch with the energy of the land.” Also, writing and creativity workshops are held each summer. (PO Box 1127, Taos, 87571) Mabel Dodge Luhan House - This historic guesthouse hosts a variety of creativity workshops, including meditation and writing sessions with Natalie Goldberg, author of “Writing Down the Bones,” and Julia Cameron, author of “The Artist’s Way.” (240 Morada Lane, Taos, 87571; phone (800) 846-2235) The Taos Poetry Circus - A weeklong series of poetry readings, seminars, videos and “slams” held each summer at various Taos locations. The festival culminates with the World Heavyweight Champion Poetry Bout, where two poets go 10 rounds, matching poem for poem, while being scored by three citizen judges. (5275 NDCMU, Taos, 87571; phone (505) 758-1800) The Helen Wurlitzer Foundation - Selected writers are given several months free housing in furnished cottages. (PO Box 545, Taos, 87571; phone (505) 758-2413)